The Atheist Blogger

Just over one week ago, a fellow atheist friend named Dan and I were in the student bar, drinking vodka-laced beverages and reading long pages of notes. In less than an hour, we would be debating two members of the Christian Union; a fundamentalist student society that believes the Bible is accurate, it just needs to read the correct way. The debate was entitled “Is God a Delusion?” , and team atheism had sorted out our lines of attack; Dan would be handling the fine-tuned universe fallacy, as well as the vicious nature of nature itself. I would be talking about the Theory of Evolution, illusions in nature, and our predisposition for seeing patterns that aren’t really there. We had conquered the writing of the speeches, we had even conquered the timing, getting everything into a 5 minute presentation each. The final thing we had to conquer were our nerves, hence the copious amounts of vodka.

This was the first time either of us had done something like this, and it didn’t help that only one other atheist had so far turned up to support us. Luckily, as the debate was about to start, 6 of our secular student group turned up to sit in the front row, which gave us that boost of morale to get us into the spirit. First up was a Christian who was reading Physics, so I expected him to go on about how the universe was such a wonderful place, fine-tuned to perfection. What I didn’t expect was for him to waffle for 4 of his 5 minutes, trying to explain what he considered “God” to be. As the chair banged her gavel to signify 1 minute remaining, my first opponent stumbled and quickly said something about how the presence of evil was proof of God. Whatever he said, I didn’t understand it at all, and I think my stomach gave a huge sigh of relief.

I was up next, and I managed to get my speech within the time limit, covering all the points I wanted to raise. The full transcript of both mine and Dan’s speeches are included below the fold on this blog post if you want to read them in full. Next up was the second Christian, who rejected a few of my reasons for why people believe in the supernatural, saying he didn’t believe for those reasons. This of course is a fallacy, as it can only be true on a personal level, and there are many people who believe in the supernatural for precisely the reasons I stated. His speech concerned Jesus and the power of prayer (which when I last checked was powerless). Not suprisingly, he criticised the scientific “prayer tests” and held them as an inaccurate way to determine whether prayer works (probably because the results determined prayer didn’t). Dan concluded the speeches with an attack of the fine-tuned universe view, quoting David Attenborough on his recent criticism of Christians, and pointed to the destructive force of nature as evidence against a loving caring God.

So then the floor was open to questions, and boy did we get them. I had to explain why Protazoa were still around “even though we evolved from them” as an American girl put, and how fish could develop arms when a mutation is required to create useless stumps first (clue: fish already have stumps…they are called fins). I also explained a rudimentry version of how we think the eye evolved, although on most of these questions I encouraged people to not take what I was saying without question, but to read up on it themselves (the last part of my speech was an appeal for people to start thinking freely). Luckily, my atheist friends asked the Christians a few questions about their beliefs, including a nice one about whether the discovery of multiple universes with different “tuning” would alter their belief in God.

An interesting couple of questions came from some Islamic students, one of whom asked me if I would mind if he came at me with a knife and killed me. I was expecting at least one question like this, and luckily I have a great response to it:

Let me get this straight. You are asking an atheist, someone who doesn’t believe in gods, the afterlife, or any kind of supernatural events, whether he would mind giving up what he believes is his only life? Of course I would mind! I happen to like life, and I’m not suddenly going to throw it all away because it is the one shot I have.

The same group of muslims asked us how we explained the revealed knowledge in the Koran, like the fact that salty water is separate from fresh water, and the Earth is shaped like an Ostrich egg. I didn’t correct his Earth shape hypothesis, because I wanted to attack the root of this question. I aked him plainly if he would read to me the passages of the Koran that said those things. He told me he didn’t have them on him, and so I told him I was sorry, but I couldn’t answer his question. I mentioned that these “revealed truths” are often simply very complex interpretations that are often extracted after the facts are known to science. The same logic can be applied to the Christian claim that the Bible talks about atoms, when all it says is “so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Hebrews 11:3).

All in all, I guess the theists reckon they won, and the atheists reckon we won. The debate was concluded and no vote was held (we agreed it would be good to just let people leave with their own opinions). A girl did come up and thank us for talking about what we believed, and that she would look into certain things more, and that’s always a good thing. Dan and I decided that we rather like debating, so we’re going to do some more in the future, and perhaps organise an “Ask an atheist” evening in March. Another friend wants to debate with me against the Islamic society, so I’m trying to get in touch with them. Stay tuned for more!

Adrian’s speech transcript

The question in tonight’s debate is whether God is a delusion or not. When I say “God” I am speaking about the whole “God” idea; that there is some kind of intelligent mind behind the universe, who has concerns for how we live our lives.

It is this idea that I believe is a complete delusion, because whilst it all sounds very nice, it is utterly ridiculous. Almost every religion today puts humanity in a special “chosen” position by their God. We have dominion over all the animals, simply because we have free will and are made in his image. This was all very well for people to believe hundreds of years ago, but the arrival of modern science changed this completely.

We began to realise that so called “revealed” truth contradicted the natural world, and the best way to find out what actually constitutes reality is via the scientific method. Slowly but surely, revealed truth was replaced by observed truth, things that you could actually test for validity, and form scientific theories to explain. The acts of gods that supposedly took a matter of days suddenly became natural processes that took millions upon billions of years; and whilst people still held humanity as divinely chosen, 150 years ago, a man named Charles Darwin changed that view forever.

Evolution is a natural process that tells us where we come from, and how. Through the fossil record, we have seen how millions of species died out, and that we are one of the many branches on the so-called “Tree of Life” that made it. So in some respect, we are “special”, as we are the result of a 4 billion year old struggle to survive. However, every single species of animal still alive today is a survivor too, and they are equally as special as we.

People will object to this though, and say that the evidence points to divine intervention by God on some occasions. The town of Lourdes in France is a major tourist attraction for Christians, some of whom believe that the water from a local spring has healing properties. Only 66 declared miracles have happened in the last 150 years, and when you take into consideration that 80,000 pilgrims come to Lourdes each year, that number seems utterly insignificant. None of those “miracles” involved the sudden regrowth of limbs, or any other permanent affliction being cured, and since a medical bureau was established in 1947, the average number of “cures” people have reported per year has dropped repeatedly. As the popular skeptic Michael Shermer would say, you have to count the misses as well as the hits.

The Lourdes fiasco all started with an apparition of the Virgin Mary, who supposedly spoke to a 14 year old peasant girl on 18 separate occasions. Her eyewitness testimony is all we have to go on, but it is interesting to note that neither her sister or friend saw the apparition, even though they were with her. In the opinion of skeptics, she is either delusional or lying, and the closed nature of the Catholic church on this issue makes investigating harder. Apparitions of various forms have been reported ever since, some turn up on pieces of toast, whilst others are more complex.

There is a great video on YouTube of an apparition of Jesus on a wall, although any sane person watching the video will understand that it is formed by the shadows of tree branches. As such, it isn’t detailed, and it really just looks like a man in a white robe. Only when you have religious people claiming it looks like Jesus does your brain interpret the figure as such. This of course is the key to the whole thing. Our brain is wired so that we notice patterns very quickly, and if you lie on the grass on a moderately cloudy day, you will start to see all kinds of objects in the clouds. They aren’t really there of course, and I don’t notice religious groups claiming them as miracles, so I fail to see how a similar illusion that happens to take the form of a man in a robe means that it is Jesus Christ. The fact is, that patterns occur everywhere, and all it takes is a human brain to recognise them.

What I want to argue is called free-thinking, and it involves throwing all dogma out of the door and looking at the world for what it is, not for what we are told it is. Once you understand that there is a natural explanation for everything, the need for dogma and revealed truth promptly vanishes. While I am sure that a belief in the supernatural was probably important for our survival in the past, and it gives people hope even to this day, I look at a universe for which we can explain some things, and utter “I have absolutely no idea” on others, and that makes it even more wonderful to live in. I think it is time for people to accept that there are unknowns, and things that we may never know, but before we delegate them out of this world, we should make sure they are in this world.

Dan’s speech transcript

There’s been a lot of talk these kinds of debates about the beauty and complexity of nature. I get a familiar response from religious people when I tell them I don’t think there’s any evidence for a god, they sort of stick there arms out and gesture at the nearest groups of trees and flowers like its completely obvious they must have been designed. David Attenborough has been in trouble recently. He’s started a new series called Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, and said he’s had an upsurge in messages from people saying he just hasn’t been acknowledging God’s handiwork enough in his programs. He said:

“They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.”

What goes for worms burrowing through eyeballs follows for everything else unfortunately. I really love his nature programs though; the BBC series Planet Earth which he narrated was amazing, attracting something like nine million viewers when it was first shown in this country. It’s gone all around the world since.

The thing which people tend to overlook when they look at pictures of wildlife is the unbelievable brutality of what they’re looking at. Everyone of those animals you see are in almost permanent terror for there lives, frightened of starving, of disease, frightened of getting an injury which is almost always a slow death sentence in the wild, and mostly frightened of just being eaten. Ultimately, all animals which aren’t kept as pets, and stroked, housed and fed their whole lives; die in one of those ways. They get old and weak and can’t get food or get too slow and get torn to pieces by predators. Think of the endless struggle out on the African plains between the zebras and antelope and the packs of wild hyenas and lions; one side can only be safe if the other starves without food, and the other can only survive by chasing down the weaker of the opposition and killing them. The system is psychopathic; it’s impersonal and totally apathetic to the suffering that’s going on. Any creator that built a system like that would have to be out of their mind.

People in favour of there being a God also like to point out the amount of ‘fine tuning’ in the universe. That the laws of things like gravity and thermodynamics have been ‘tuned’ ideally to create a universe full of life. The thing that really strikes me is that all that ‘fine tuning’ has created a universe that is almost completely empty space. You being present in 99.9 recurring percent of the universe will kill you instantly. We exist on one piece of space allotted to us in all that emptiness, in a thin film of life, on a climactic knife-edge, on a speck of dust.

And even there we aren’t safe. This is a world where more than 200,000 people can be swept off the beaches of the Indian Ocean, one day after Christmas. In fact the people of the western hemisphere were still celebrating, still eating mince pies and pulling crackers as the Asian Tsunami struck in 2004. There were families in America just sitting down and saying grace at their Christmas tables, as thousands of towns and villages were annihilated, and millions turned into widows, orphans and refugees. The universe really isn’t sentimental about its timing. But the devil is in the detail with these things, and one that gets me is some of the eyewitness reports. When tsunamis are coming in, the sea naturally draws out along the coast; people reported the small children from the local villages running out onto the miles of open beaches and laughing at all the stranded fish, totally oblivious to what was coming at them at nearly the speed of sound. The reason why things like that don’t drive us mad is because we know it isn’t personal, natural disasters just happen. We accept that the universe wasn’t designed with us in mind. But if there is a God, every bad thing that ever happens to us suddenly becomes something malicious, an all powerful, all knowing God cannot not be responsible for things like tsunamis and earthquakes, plague and the AIDS virus.

So really, to those of you who see God’s handiwork everywhere in nature what I say is, yes, look around you, but really look and be honest with yourself about what your seeing. To understand that there cannot be a God, and certainly not a benevolent one, is like a realisation of the obvious, it’s just so clear.